depression comix #305

It’s hard to remember this is an illness, not a choice or a personality defect. Accepting depression as a medical condition is one of the great challenges of mental illness. Even though suicide is one of the top ten causes of death (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm) the illness label still eludes us.

In terms of feedback I get from this comic, I still get too many that suggest that depression is a lucid choice. If we just realize how awesome life is, we will snap out of it and resume a productive healthy life. This idea is so pervasive in society that we tend to think that way ourselves, that it isn’t an illness and we are just messing up our own lives, helping us sink even further into the darkness. But if we think of it as an illness and treat it as a medical condition, it is easier I think. We can validate our need for intervention, we can accept our bad days better, and we can stop blaming ourselves for feeling this way. But we have a long way to go before it’s accepted as an illness, even though it’s commonly grouped under mental illnesses.

This is one of my favorite characters in the strip. I really like drawing her into the strip whenever I can, she appears at least once every ten strips and is third for number of appearances of depressed characters.